Features – The Round Tablehttp://beloitcollegeroundtable.com
Mon, 19 Nov 2018 18:00:06 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.8https://i0.wp.com/beloitcollegeroundtable.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/cropped-rsz_rt_logo_2-1.jpg?fit=32%2C32Features – The Round Tablehttp://beloitcollegeroundtable.com
3232116665743Ernest “Shitposiums” celebrate pet-passionshttp://beloitcollegeroundtable.com/2018/11/19/ernest-shitposiums-celebrate-pet-passions/
http://beloitcollegeroundtable.com/2018/11/19/ernest-shitposiums-celebrate-pet-passions/#respondMon, 19 Nov 2018 18:00:06 +0000http://beloitcollegeroundtable.com/?p=2803The air in the lecture hall was heavy with the smell of Domino’s pizza. It was 5:00 p.m. and a group of students had gathered in the tiered rows of Science Center 150. Munching politely on pizza and other snacks, including mac and cheese, pretzels and carrots, the audience listened to the findings of Autumn Carney’s‘19 research on which showers in Peet are the best.

After using each and every one of the Peet showers for a total of at least two minutes each, Carney concluded that the best shower in the dorm is located on the first floor. The fourth floor showers, according to her research, are the worst.

Carney’s was one of the many “Shitposiums” conducted on Symposium Day this past Wednesday. Shitposiums are, at first glance, a simple spoof on the academic, credited and research-based presentation. Whereas a normal symposium makes an argument based on an understood seriousness of its research, a shitposium focuses on the personal passions, pet-peeves and obsessions of the presenter.

You’d expect an event like this to aim for laughs, but what was most disarming and delightful about this past Shitposium night was its earnestness.

Carney stayed at the front of the room fielding questions long after her presentation had ended. Attendees asked her about her methodology (a rating system of 1 to 5), what was the control group of her experiment (the favorable qualities of the 1st floor showers) and how often did she use each one (most once, but a few twice).

“I didn’t expect there to be this many questions,” Carney laughed before ending her presentation.

Each presentation was punctuated by a brief intermission as the next person on deck set up their powerpoint. The atmosphere was relaxed. People filtered in and out throughout the shitposiums, and stepped up in the breaks between to grab snacks and talk to their friends.

Next, Pieter Bonin‘19 gave a presentation entitled “Snek vs. Snake,” which talked about the attributes of different types of snakes, explained in an internet vernacular. Bonin, who has personal experience with snakes, fondly explained that they are very stupid, tube-shaped animals.

Some of the terms Bonin used to describe and categorize snakes included “Danger Noodles,” “Boop Snoots,” and the mimicry-based “You’ve been faked snek.” Bonin’s presentation was greeted by audience questions about snake classifications and identifications. Audience members used Bonin’s own terminology in the phrasings of their questions.

Another notable shitposium came from Aaron Hirst‘19. Hirst’s shitposium, entitled “Bertolt Brecht: Why and How I’m Going to Punch Him Out, and Why You Should Join Me,” an impassioned and frustrated presentation on the theatrical theories of Brecht, inventor of Epic Theater, and why they are fundamentally flawed.

Hirst explained the tenets of Brecht’s Epic Theater, verfremdung and gestus, the practices of isolating an actor from a character and boiling down characters to gestures, respectively. Hirst talked about how Brecht wanted to make his audience active rather than passive, writing exclusively for upper class theater goers of the 1930s in order to convince them to do something to change society.

Plays in the 1930s, Hirst argued, were just bad, but they shaped the cultural environment that germinated Brecht’s ideas about theater, ideas he argues that harm the medium as it stands today.

Hirst said that the Brechtian play Beloit put on last year, “The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui” wasn’t good, and that modern productions of Brecht are ineffective because theater is no longer the primary medium through which people absorb culture.

The presentation moved from an examination of Brecht and transformed into an examination of Hirst’s own frustrations with theater. Hirst stated that theater appeals to a very specific demographic of people who already enjoy theater, i.e. “Democrats who have money” and that makes it an ineffective medium for communicating information.

Theater is dying, according to Hirst, who at this point of the presentation was visibly disgruntled. However, he stated that the movie “The Big Short” uses Brechtian elements effectively, and could signal the beginning of a promising new genre in film.

Noel Jones‘19 gave a thoughtful and well-researched presentation on “Flat Earth Theories.” Jones took it on themself to consolidate much of flat earth theory into a statement of purpose, which read as follows: “The Flat Earth Society mans the guns against oppression of thought and the Globularist lies of a new age. Standing with reason we offer a home to those wayward thinkers that march bravely on with REASON and TRUTH in recognizing the TRUE shape of the Earth – Flat.”

Jones’s shitposium was fantastic and dry, humorous but clearly thorough and done in the spirit of learning more about other people’s perspective. Evidence for a flat earth includes the fact that the horizon always rises to meet the eye, the curvature to the horizon is not visible from airplanes, and that NASA’s images of Earth from space are doctored.

Gravity is not real, “things just fall,” and the other planets in our solar system are round, just not Earth. Antarctica is not actually a continent, but a massive ice wall that rings the flattened Earth together. An especially fringe theory dictates that Australia is fake, and that everyone who supposedly lives there are in South America and are just pretending.

“In some versions space exists. In some versions it doesn’t.” Jones explained, calmly seated at the front of the classroom.

Though their presentation was humorous, Jones ended on a sincere note. They explained that many people who believe in Flat Earth theories have been given reason to distrust academic authority, and often lack the resources to become better educated. Jones encouraged empathy for those people, while acknowledging that their presentation had been poking fun at them.

The shitposiums could have easily been a cynical and parody-based spoof on research-based presentations. Instead, they were a celebration of the niche interests of individuals. The atmosphere was accepting and earnest, wry but curious, amiable and well-fed. Wednesday night marked the promising continuation of a new tradition, a DIY fest of pet-obsessions for people who want to learn.

]]>http://beloitcollegeroundtable.com/2018/11/19/ernest-shitposiums-celebrate-pet-passions/feed/02803The Crisis of Our Centuryhttp://beloitcollegeroundtable.com/2018/11/13/2782/
http://beloitcollegeroundtable.com/2018/11/13/2782/#respondTue, 13 Nov 2018 18:49:04 +0000http://beloitcollegeroundtable.com/?p=2782Sunday marked the 100-year anniversary of the grinding conclusion of World War I. The First World War was a human catastrophe. It upended everything the Western world had come to believe. It was a mindless, mechanical, and meaningless war that swallowed an entire generation and forever re-shaped the geo-political and cultural reality of the century to come. By the end, monarchical Russia had collapsed and was rebuilding into the Soviet Union. Germany, impoverished and resentful, was placed on a track towards Nazism. The United States stepped into the international sphere, where it would become inextricably enmeshed.

Centuries are shaped by societal trauma. Rapid shifts in collective human understandings of society cause whiplash and have consequences. WWI ushered in the era of fully mechanized war and set the stage for the rise of fascism in Europe, in turn leading to WWII, which ushered in the nuclear age, the Cold War, Vietnam, the birth of the internet, and the establishment of global American hegemony.

Reflecting on this leads one to consider the future of our present century. What is the trauma that will shape our historical era? The fundamental answer: climate change.

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a report warning that hundreds of millions of lives are at stake should the global temperature rise higher than 1.5 degrees Celsius.

At our present course, that will happen by the year 2040. All of the world’s coral reefs will die out. Wildfires and heat waves will ravage the planet annually. Rapid fluctuations between drought and flooding will jeopardize the world’s food supplies.

This is, disturbingly, a best-case scenario. As it stands now, it will not be possible to keep the climate from warming higher than two degrees Celsius. In fact, it’s estimated that by the end of the century the global temperature will have risen four.

The ramifications of this are immense. At two degrees, the polar ice caps will melt and flood the world’s coastal cities. The global GDP will drop 13 percent. Four hundred million people will suffer from water scarcity. In equatorial regions, such as India, there will be 32 times as many extreme heat waves, each lasting five times as long.

At three degrees, southern Europe will be in permanent drought. Droughts in South America will last 19 months, 21 months in the Caribbean, and up to five years in North Africa. A rise in sea-levels and severe flooding will exaggerate river damage globally.

At four degrees, the global grain supply may fall by 50 percent. Food crises will become a yearly event. The international economy will shrink by 30 percent. Under widespread strain, conflict and warfare will rise in frequency.

According to the IPCC, slowing this catastrophic rise will require an effort similar to that of the United States’ mobilization before World War II, but enacted at a global scale. That is a tall order considering the state of the present world order, which has become increasingly nationalistic and authoritarian in recent years.

In fact, the trend towards authoritarianism is part and parcel with climate change. Global destabilization has resulted in mass migrations of peoples across borders. The Trump brand of ‘Build-the Wall’ anti-immigrant paranoia has been echoed across the world, and is being used to restrict individual liberties and corrode democratic systems.

It is likely that the pendulum will continue to swing right as the effects of climate change enact further instability across the world. Even people in the wealthiest of countries will be displaced. A great deal of New York City is going to be underwater in the next 30 years. Considering how many cities lie on America’s coasts, expect mass migration within the country as people annually lose their homes to flooding and storms.

The crisis of our century is three-fold. Its most fundamental is climate change, seconded by authoritarianism. Its last and far-reaching component is artificial intelligence.

AI technology is poised to eliminate 40 percent of all jobs. That is an unprecedented level of automation that will change how human society functions at an elemental level. Public trust in news and information will continue to erode as video and audio manipulation technology becomes more and more sophisticated and widespread. Facial recognition software gives governments and corporations the power to target people and increase mass surveillance. AI’s like the Google Assistant, capable of impersonating a human voice in a conversation over the phone, will likely be used to target and manipulate people for insidious purposes.

Suffice to say, the road ahead is steep and frightening.

It is important to understand that what is now history was once the present. World War I was not inevitable. It resulted, in part, from political negligence and flawed understandings of societal trends and technological capability. Most everyone living at the eve of the first World War likely thought their world would never change. But it did. And it will.

We face a century of global disruption at a scale that is arguably unprecedented. No matter the specifics of what happens, our world will not be the same, but things do not have to continue on their present course. We are not doomed to the full and apocalyptic force of climate change if we act now. We do not have to resort to authoritarianism to deal with mass migration of peoples and environmental destabilization. Artificial intelligence can do great things for humanity, so long as there are people ready to use it for good.

Now is the time to unite for the greater good of our global community. Come together on what you can. Do good. Adapt and be ready.

Source: New York Magazine

]]>http://beloitcollegeroundtable.com/2018/11/13/2782/feed/02782Artificially Intelligent Physicist Has Monumental Implicationshttp://beloitcollegeroundtable.com/2018/11/13/artificially-intelligent-physicist-has-monumental-implications/
http://beloitcollegeroundtable.com/2018/11/13/artificially-intelligent-physicist-has-monumental-implications/#respondTue, 13 Nov 2018 18:44:24 +0000http://beloitcollegeroundtable.com/?p=2771The Department of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT) released a report announcing plans for an artificially intelligent physicist. The report, written by Tailin Wu and Max Tegmark, published on November 6, details plans for an AI Physicist capable of learning and storing a multitude of theories to form a knowledge base, allowing it to draw new conclusions from a wide variety of experiments and environments.

The report is a dense piece of computer science and physics writing, but parsed broadly, its authors explain that past efforts at creating an AI physicist have been hampered by an algorithm’s inability to interpret data drawn from a wide array of environments. Previous incarnations of such algorithms have also been poor at communicating intelligible conclusions.

“To address these challenges, we will borrow from physics the core idea of a theory.” The report details the architecture and focus of their AI physicist. Instead of fitting a single, large model to all the data (as is the standard machine-learning paradigm), Wu and Tegmark’s physicist accumulates smaller theories gradually, learning and organizing them.

These theories are allowed to “divide-and-conquer,” giving each its own range to specialize and compete, while also subjecting all of them to the Occam’s Razor strategy, which favors simple theories that explain a lot, but are not overfitted to wide ranges of data.

The structure of the AI is built to favor continued learning based on past conclusions. Similar theories found in different environments are clustered together and then unified under a “mastery theory.” All learned theories are stored in a “theory hub,” which can be drawn on for future reference.

The architecture of the AI’s learning agent is as follows: The theory hub is at the center of the algorithm’s structure. As it encounters a new environment, the algorithm first proposes old theories from the hub as they account for the newly collected data, as well as randomly generated new theories for the rest of the data.

All of these theories are then tested via the divide-and-conquer strategy in general and specific scopes simultaneously. The theory hub then applies Occam’s Razor to simplify all the theories, while at the same time clustering similar ones from a variety of environments to generate master theories. These theories can then be added back into the theory hub, to be recycled and run through again with new data.

If the AI physicist functions as proposed, its potential is immense. A well-built AI is adept at drawing and learning from a wide range of data, over and over, constantly, and fast. Assuming its functionality, this AI physicist will alter the field of physics, and all of the sciences, forever.

Being able to accelerate trial and error thinking at this complex a level, using a rich wealth of data, and translating it to theories designed to be widely applicable and adaptable means that the scientific process itself will move faster than ever before. Research itself is becoming mechanized, and the results may well be jarring.

The sciences will soon come to be dominated by algorithms like these, which means advances in fields like physics are going to come more and more rapidly. Consider the rate of technological growth between the year 1900 and 1999. Consider the rate of technological growth from the year 2000 to 2018. As AI continues to be integrated into our everyday lives, this pace will grow near-exponentially. Considering the ways in which physics seeks to understand and manipulate the fundamental functionality of our universe, and the speed at which an AI physicist can operate, expect to see the world change faster than ever before.

Source: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

]]>http://beloitcollegeroundtable.com/2018/11/13/artificially-intelligent-physicist-has-monumental-implications/feed/02771Anti-Semitism: Progressive America’s Blindspothttp://beloitcollegeroundtable.com/2018/11/05/2746/
http://beloitcollegeroundtable.com/2018/11/05/2746/#respondMon, 05 Nov 2018 18:00:52 +0000http://beloitcollegeroundtable.com/?p=2746Just as Shabbat services began, on Saturday, October 22 at the Tree of Life synagogue, in Pittsburgh, PA, Robert Bowers, 46, stormed the building and committed the most heinous anti-Semitic attack in America’s history. The attack took the lives of 11 members of the historic and predominantly Jewish, Squirrel Hill community. Despite multiple requests from members of the community such as Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto and Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald, not to make an appearance, President Trump visited the Tree of Life synagogue, just three days after the shooting occurred.

The country reeled in response such a blatant act of anti-Semitism, showing in part just how shrouded the issue is. Though this attack is a wildly more extreme example of it, anti-Semitism is not new, it is and has been rampant in the United States. There was a noticeable spike of anti-Semitic messages published on social media leading up to both the 2016 and 2018 elections, with an additional spike following the former. Many of these attacks and microaggressions go unnoticed. Jews have become the butt of the joke in so much of pop culture, and those instances of anti-Semitism simply haven’t been called out as much. More egregious acts have occurred at progressive institutions like Beloit College, where two years ago a violently anti-Semitic note was anonymously written to a Jewish student, containing multiple slurs and referencing methods of genocide used during the Holocaust.

Many of the responses to the tragedy further prove the insensitivity some people have towards anti-Semitism. Vice president Mike Pence attempted to show solidarity by asking a “Prominent member of the Jewish community” to give prayers in honor of the victims. The problem? He brought Loren Jacobs, a rabbi who practices Messianic Judaism, colloquially known as “Jews For Jesus”. Messianic Judaism is notoriously offensive to members of the Jewish community, as it undercuts one of the pillars of Judaism, that the Messiah is not Jesus Christ or even the son of God. Some Jews even find the faith malicious, as it includes a mission to have Jews accept Jesus as their Messiah.

A tweet from Detroit rabbi Jason Miller eviscerated Pence for choosing a practitioner of the Messianic faith, which is technically a branch of Christianity, to offer prayers for the victims instead of one of the 60 or more rabbis who live in Michigan. The use of the phrase “In the name of Jesus” to close the speech, is a perfect encapsulation of the blatant tone-deafness the responses to events such as these can sometimes have, as well as the impact it can have on affected communities.

Now, as I feel a need to speak my own mind on this topic, the remainder of this article should be read as an Op-Ed. We are simply not doing enough. Tragedies like this happen, people say “Never again” and wave meaningless gestures in front of the Jewish community’s face in an effort to show solidarity, or maybe just to be “woke”. But know: this has to continue. You still have to stand with us as well as with blacks, LGBTQ+, Muslims, immigrants, women, and all groups subjected to persecution, two weeks, a month, a year after this tragedy, even after the next mass shooting inevitably happens, and another disenfranchised group is gunned down, for nothing but who they are and what they believe, you must remember to stand by us too. So know, that when you add the hip new “#TogetherAgainstAntisemitism” Jewish star to your Facebook profile or talk about how terrible this tragedy was, and denounce anti-Semitism, know that it is your responsibility to maintain and actively demonstrate your conviction on that stance. Know that next time, it should be you to speak up when someone starts making quips about my “Jewy looks”. Know that next time, it has to be you, to say something when someone who knows my faith, continuously and repeatedly tells me to accept Jesus Christ as my savior, and damns me to hell if I don’t. Know that next time, it must be you who stands by me, when someone, maybe even someone who you call a friend spits at me, looks me in the eyes, and then calls me a kike.

]]>http://beloitcollegeroundtable.com/2018/11/05/2746/feed/02746Artificial Intelligence and the U.S-China Tech Duopolyhttp://beloitcollegeroundtable.com/2018/10/29/artificial-intelligence-and-the-u-s-china-tech-duopoly/
http://beloitcollegeroundtable.com/2018/10/29/artificial-intelligence-and-the-u-s-china-tech-duopoly/#respondMon, 29 Oct 2018 17:00:33 +0000http://beloitcollegeroundtable.com/?p=2702Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the most significant technological development of our century. Its applications are broad and its effects profound. AI technologies are poised to wipe out an unprecedented 40 percent of all human jobs, and will usher in a flush of innovations, complications and radically new understandings at a breakneck speed. AI is going to change the world.

The geopolitical landscape has already begun to shift accordingly. China and the United States, data-rich countries with thriving tech industries, are poised to become the dual AI giants of the globe.

“The AI revolution will have two engines—China and the United States—pushing its progress swiftly forward.” Kai-Fu Lee said in an interview with the Washington Post. “It is unlike any previous technological revolution that emerged from a singular cultural setting. Having two engines will further accelerate the pace of technology.”

Lee is an AI expert. He is the chairman of Sinovation Ventures and president of its Artificial Intelligence Institute, and was the founding president of Google China. Lee developed the first speaker-independent, continuous speech recognition system as his PhD thesis at Carnegie Mellon.

In his new book “AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley and the New World Order” Lee argues that the world of AI has become a “duopoly,” whereby China and the United States drive each other’s innovations further while respectively dominating other parts of the world.

In his Washington Post interview, Lee explains his vision for our geopolitical future during the advent of artificial intelligence. When it comes to AI, Lee appears first and foremost an optimist. He stated that AI has already allowed people to further their knowledge through search engines, connected people who speak different languages through machine translation, and made significant reductions to fraud.

Lee believes AI will personalize and lower the cost of medical care, accelerate education, and automate manufacturing, enabling automated stores and self-driving cars. PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates AI will add $15.7 trillion to the world economy by 2030.

This comes at a cost, which Lee acknowledges. “Taking care of our chores and automating manufacturing, of course, will mean a total disruption of patterns of work and employment. Some estimate as many as 40 percent of current jobs will be lost to intelligent machines.”

Lee states that such a shift is similar to the move from agriculture to manufacturing, last seen during the Industrial Revolution, and that navigating such a massive loss of jobs will be a central global challenge for the next 15 years.

However, Lee’s focus is primarily on the different approaches and strengths of the United States and China, the worlds’ leading AI competitors. The two countries are rich in data, giving them an advantage in AI development.

“Data is the raw material on which AI runs.” Lee explained. “It is like the role of oil in powering an industrial economy. As an AI algorithm is fed more examples of the phenomenon you want the algorithm to understand, it gains greater and greater accuracy.”

Though both countries have a great deal of data, there is a gap between the breadth and depth of the information each country collects. Whereas China’s domestic population using 4G networks is larger than the United States, American Internet companies can bring in their users globally, giving them a wider breadth of data collection. Additionally, American companies are, so far, more adept at accumulating AI-ready data for fast use.

China, however, is unmatched when it comes to the depth of the data it can collect about its users. Chinese companies can thus create a deeper and more multi-dimensional picture of their users, allowing their algorithms to precisely tailor product offerings to each individual. This ability will accelerate AI’s implementation across the landscape of the Chinese economy.

Lee believes that the respective spheres of Chinese and American AI will resemble parallel universes. “ The radically different business model in China, married to Chinese user habits, creates indigenous branding and monetization strategies as well as an entirely alternative infrastructure for apps and content. It is therefore very difficult, if not impossible, for any American company to try to enter China’s market or vice versa. It’s like two different jigsaw puzzles. You can’t take a piece from one and try to fit it into the other — everything is different.”

Yet companies in both countries are seeking forms of international expansion. U.S. companies and their technological infrastructure and methodology already dominate North America, Australia, and Europe. This is a technical empire Lee imagines will continue.

China, meanwhile, is expanding into the markets of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The markets in these regions, where there are lots of people in the low-income bracket, are compatible with Chinese models.

Tech entrepreneurs in Brazil, India, and Indonesia are open to partnerships with Chinese companies, agreements in which Chinese companies share in the upside of investment but do not own the other company outright, injecting money and technical know-how into the less-developed markets.

The global picture of an AI duopoly is striking. “If you were to draw a map a decade from now, you would see China’s tech zone — built not on ownership but partnerships — stretching across Southeast Asia, Indonesia, Africa and to some extent South America.” Lee explained. “The U.S. zone would entail North America, Australia and Europe. Over time, the ‘parallel universes’ already extant in the United States and China will grow to cover the whole world.”

Considering the extent to which AI technology will come to affect the day-to-day operations of human society at a macro and micro level, the differences between Chinese and American AI-based societies will likely be stark, with consequences that are fundamental.

Lee believes Russia is a wild card, and did not rule out the possibility that Europe, a tech colony of the United States, will carve out its own individual approach to AI within the American umbrella.

The Cold War parallels of such a dual world order are obvious. What will it mean to have two technological powerhouses driving alongside one another? Considering the speed at which AI learns and advances, the divide between the U.S. and Chinese world spheres will widen fast, with consequences we cannot readily predict.

Lee, optimistic, does not believe that the AI duopoly will lead to a technological arms race between the superpowers. “An AI arms race would be a grave mistake. The AI boom is more akin to the spread of electricity in the early Industrial Revolution than nuclear weapons during the Cold War.”

Lee said that unlike other sciences, AI experiments can be replicated and shared, diminishing incentive for competition and increasing incentive for sharing knowledge in the interest of expanding the field at large. “In a way, having parallel universes should diminish conflict. They can coexist while each can learn from the other. It is not a zero-sum game of winners and losers.”

Still, the greatest challenges of this emerging world order will be felt by the individual human beings living during the shift to come. Low-skill and low-wage jobs are going to be eliminated, and the ultra-rich stand to make a great deal of money from AI proliferation. Social inequality is going to widen.

“The jobs that AI cannot do are those of creators, or what I call ‘empathetic jobs’ in services, which will be the largest category that can absorb those displaced from routine jobs.” Lee predicted. “A great effort must be made not only to increase the number of those jobs and create a career path for them but to increase their social status, which also means increasing the pay of these jobs.”

If Lee’s prediction is accurate, an American and Chinese AI world order will have a profound effect on global governance, infrastructure, economy, and culture. Consider the lifestyle of an average person living in the year 1900 and 1999 respectively. The 20th century saw an immense shift in the structure of the individual lifestyle and in the larger world order. Expect to experience that level of change two or three times over by 2099.

]]>http://beloitcollegeroundtable.com/2018/10/29/artificial-intelligence-and-the-u-s-china-tech-duopoly/feed/02702New Beloit club advocates criminal justice reformhttp://beloitcollegeroundtable.com/2018/10/04/new-beloit-club-advocates-criminal-justice-reform/
http://beloitcollegeroundtable.com/2018/10/04/new-beloit-club-advocates-criminal-justice-reform/#respondThu, 04 Oct 2018 23:18:00 +0000http://beloitcollegeroundtable.com/?p=2636The United States is still the best in the world at incarcerating their own population. The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, even when compared to larger, and even more totalitarian nations. While the prison population has decreased over the past couple of years, the United States still spends over $80 billion on correction facilities.

For years there have been national bipartisan efforts to seriously address criminal justice reform. This semester a Beloit College senior has taken it into her own hands to make Beloit College students a part of those efforts.

Liberating the Convicted is a brand new club founded by Alexandria Kohn’19. “The idea was fostered from my work in LA this summer,” she explained. In Los Angeles, Kohn worked with the Arts for Incarcerated Youth Network. A program that, according to their website, provides different arts programming “to build resiliency and wellness, eliminate recidivism, and transform the juvenile justice system.”

Throughout June, Kohn contemplated forming the new club but did not fully commit until August. It is a topic that Kohn has always been passionate and inquisitive about. “I was always interested in this punitive idea of punishment,” Kohn stated. Her experiences earlier in life also made it something she constantly considered. Seeing her friends go to juvenile detention, her experiences after her own brother was incarcerated and her time in Los Angeles with the network cemented her belief that the issue of incarceration is not behavioral, but systemic.

“The United States is the number one jailer. How did we come to that?” she mused. It is a question Kohn hopes other students can start to ask as well.

Liberating the Convicted is not an official club–they do not have a Clubs and Organization Oversight representative, set constitution or budget–but their unofficial status has not slowed the club down. Instead, the club has already met a couple of times and hosted their first event of the semester: a letter drive. The event, held on Sept. 21, was successful, with over 50 letters signed.

Letters went to South Carolina representatives and demanded the evacuation of incarcerated citizens in evacuation zones during natural emergencies, a pressing demand after news emerged that incarcerated individuals in South Carolina would not be evacuated as Hurricane Florence barreled towards the state despite mandatory evacuation orders for residents.

The letter drive is an example of Kohn’s mission for the club: tangible and active efforts for change. “I want more of an action based club. This is not going to be theorizing and talking about prison reform but we are actually going to do things to make an impact, make change,” Kohn emphasized. “We are pushing reform.”

It is a club that will also be working “towards dismantling the prison system and spreading awareness on mass incarceration and hyper policing, locally….[We will] help at a local level and also with Wisconsin’s legislation that’s targeted towards incarceration,” Kohn said during early advertisements for the club on the Beloit College Student Group.

“A lot of horrific things happen in our prison system,” Kohn said, and so more events will occur that aim to inform others on campus about the issue, and work to dismantle these practices.

Without a budget Kohn hopes to collaborate with clubs, which will also help the club to better reach out to others on campus.

While the club does not have an official executive board Kohn mentioned a couple of passionate members.

Grace Gerloff’19 joined Liberating the Convicted as a firm believer that “prison abolition needs to be a part of any conversation about race, identity, power, capitalism etc.” Gerloff was also excited to participate in “something that extends beyond campus.” Additionally, Gerloff has “always been really inspired by [Alex’s] work and what she has to say.”

Gerloff wants “other students and myself to use the critical thinking skills that Beloit is so damn proud of to challenge their perceptions of ‘good guys vs bad guys’ and to feel compelled to take action against oppression instead of just writing a paper about it or sharing a Facebook article.” She wants others “to experience different forms of resistance and dissent and learn how action in any form and at any level can influence change. I think students should be aware of the fact that the “justice” system in the US is not justice, it is punishment.”

Eva Haykin’21 similarly echoed Gerloff’s belief in the abolition of prisons especially “because criminality is racialized, the US prison system further marginalizes incarcerated individuals of color in masses under the guise of solving social issues by putting these people behind bars — in reality, incarceration only creates more of these social issues.” Haykin reflected on her experience visiting an immigration detention center last semester during Spring Break with another group of students and how impactful that was.

In a continuation of Kohn’s active efforts students will likely see posters around campus listing companies that use prison labor this week. “It is many more than people expect,” Kohn noted. Some websites list up to 50 companies participating in prison labor at various levels, the list includes McDonald’s, Whole Foods, Victoria’s Secret and AT&T.

Kohn also hopes to host a screening of “13th”– a 2016 documentary by Ava DuVernay that explores racial injustice through the examination of U.S’ disproportionately black prison population– followed by a panel discussion.

Students interested in joining the club are welcome to attend their meetings on Sundays at 6 p.m. in Haven’s common area.

]]>http://beloitcollegeroundtable.com/2018/10/04/new-beloit-club-advocates-criminal-justice-reform/feed/02636New Faculty Profiles: Prof. Nahir Otaño-Graciahttp://beloitcollegeroundtable.com/2018/10/03/new-faculty-profiles-prof-nahir-otano-gracia/
http://beloitcollegeroundtable.com/2018/10/03/new-faculty-profiles-prof-nahir-otano-gracia/#respondWed, 03 Oct 2018 21:02:59 +0000http://beloitcollegeroundtable.com/?p=2626“I found out that my strength is that I don’t give up,” Professor Nahir Otaño-Gracia explained, remembering the difficulty she had when learning Old Norse, Old Irish and Old English. Otaño-Gracia has translated texts from each of these languages, is proficient in French and Creole and fluent in English and Spanish. She is a new Assistant Professor of English at Beloit College, and is a dedicated Medievalist.

“Medievalism didn’t just happen in Europe and the United States,” Otaño-Gracia said. “It’s so much more complicated.”

Indeed, Otaño-Gracia’s own trajectory defies expectation. Otaño-Gracia was born and raised in Puerto Rico. She lived in Pennsylvania from when she was 12 to 16 before returning to her home, where she studied at the University of Puerto Rico and earned a Bachelor’s in French and Comparative Literature.

“The plan was that I was going to be a Carribeanist,” Otaño-Gracia said. By her last year at the University of Puerto Rico, she had intended to work with English, Creole and Spanish.

Otaño-Gracia’s plans changed after she took what proved to be a crucial combination of classes on Vikings, King Arthur and Puerto Rican literature. She discovered that she loved medieval literature, and that its scope was not confined to Europe. “We read a Puerto Rican text that had an Arthurian character in it, and I realized…there were Medievalisms within the literature I was looking [at].”

Otaño-Gracia changed course. She earned a PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where she began her studies as a Medievalist. She learned Old Norse and Old Irish at U-Mass before earning a grant to enroll in a post-doctorate program at the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied Old English.

Since then Otaño-Gracia has specialized in Medieval literature with a focus on Global Arthurian Studies. Finding Medievalisms within Caribbean literature is still a facet of her work.

A story known in English as The Astrologer is an example a text that challenges the notion that Medieval literature is strictly European. The story is part of the first book ever published in Puerto Rico by Puerto Ricans, regarded as the beginning of the island’s literature. “Even from…the conception of Puerto Rican literature, medievalism is there.”

The Astrologer is about a couple living in Asturias, Spain, who fall in love. They make a pact with the devil, promising they will love each other forever, but they break their promise and both of them die. The man dies in Asturias. The woman dies on her way to Puerto Rico.

Otaño-Gracia explains that the story is talking about the breakage with the Old World and Europe, but not with the Medieval mythos. The text is not considered significant beyond its being part of the first in Puerto Rico, but Otaño-Gracia argues that it helps reframe an understanding of Puerto Rican identity within Medieval literature.

As a woman of color in an overwhelmingly white field, Otaño-Gracia has had to navigate and challenge traditional presumptions firsthand. It has not been easy.

“It was very hard at the beginning,” she remembered. “When I went to my first medieval conference people kept asking me why I was a Medievalist.”

According to Otaño-Gracia, many assumed she was studying Arabic because of her first name, and were confused when she told them she was working on a paper about Vikings. She left the conference feeling discouraged. “I came out of it thinking that maybe I wasn’t supposed to be a Medievalist.”

An advisor told Otaño-Gracia to not let others in her field get to her, and that she didn’t need them. “But what that meant was that I didn’t go to Medieval conferences as much. I would kind of hide in plain sight…I think I distanced myself. I was a Medievalist but I wasn’t part of the Medieval field.”

It took a long time for Otaño-Gracia to become more comfortable. She said that she was lucky to have studied at U-Penn, which connected her to others in the Medieval field and helped her get her name out there.

A little over a year ago Otaño-Gracia discovered the Medievalists of Color, a fellowship of scholars studying the early, high, and late Middle Ages who identify as persons of color. For Otaño-Gracia, joining the group has been extremely helpful.

Medievalists of Color has given Otaño-Gracia a community of people who can truly understand her position and can provide a shared understanding of its difficulties. Otaño-Gracia is thankful to all of her previous mentors and advisors, but acknowledged that this sense of understanding is not something they could have provided her.

“None of them know what it is to be in a conference, and a colleague from the conference who you’ve seen in the conference, who just talked to you…outside, confuses you with the waitress and asks you to get them a new table. That happens to me. More than once. It has happened to a lot of other medievalists of color.”

Otaño-Gracia’s world has changed because of the group. Finding a community that understands her has helped her realized how trapped and isolated she felt before. Since joining, she feels that she is thriving.

Being a Medievalist is hard, slow, and careful work. To translate a text from an ancient language, resurrecting and re-interpreting its sub-textual meanings, is no easy task. Otaño-Gracia knows this, and is unfazed.

“I don’t get tired of doing it. I look up the words I don’t know even if I know I’ve looked it up. I actually mark which words I’ve looked up, and some of them have three or four marks. ‘I’ve looked you up four times already!’” Otaño-Gracia laughed. “So it’s slow, and a little painful, but I get to read the texts, and that’s what I want. So that part is worth it.”

At Beloit, Professor Otaño-Gracia will be teaching Medieval literature, Renaissance studies courses and other classes involving archival materials and the digital humanities. Her courses will give students the tools to partake in digital archiving, and to examine the ways in which digital communities work in relation to social justice issues.

]]>http://beloitcollegeroundtable.com/2018/10/03/new-faculty-profiles-prof-nahir-otano-gracia/feed/02626FDA threatens ban on Juuls and e-cigarettes amidst addiction, health riskshttp://beloitcollegeroundtable.com/2018/10/03/fda-threatens-ban-on-juuls-and-e-cigarettes-amidst-addiction-health-risks/
http://beloitcollegeroundtable.com/2018/10/03/fda-threatens-ban-on-juuls-and-e-cigarettes-amidst-addiction-health-risks/#respondWed, 03 Oct 2018 20:57:04 +0000http://beloitcollegeroundtable.com/?p=2623The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a warning on Wednesday, September 12 that teenage and underage usage of flavored electronic cigarettes has reached “ an epidemic proportion,” and as result sent out over 1,200 letters of warning to various retailers, as well as large fines to over 130 establishments, for selling their products to minors. The agency stated that if makers of these products cannot prove they can halt the flood of sales to minors in 60 days, their products may be removed from the market.

This announcement from the FDA was the result of the largest coordinated enforcement action in FDA history, following a recent and unpublished study that showed a 75 percent increase in e-cigarette smoking among middle and high school students from 2017. FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb cited the rising sales trends and concerns from both parents and teachers as signs of the rising epidemic. Federal law prohibits the selling of cigarette products to anyone under the age of 18, however, the study showed that over two million underage students are regular smokers of e-cigarettes.

Stores included in the warning letters were Walgreens, Walmart, 7-Eleven, Exxon, Circle K, Shell and Citgo gas stations. Fines were imposed for up to $11,182 against retailers that had repeated instances of selling their products to people under the age of 18. Five manufactures, including Juul Labs, were threatened with a ban if they cannot submit a plan to curb sales to minors. Gottlieb stated that if the plans cannot reverse this trend substantially the FDA will take steps to ban flavored products.

Many companies, including Juul and Blu, use flavors in their products, which some argue draw in young consumers, while others claim they help adults quit smoking traditional cigarettes. Gottlieb described the risk of another generation becoming addicted to nicotine as being “paramount.” While e-cigarette smokers inhale less toxins than traditional cigarette users–and fewer toxins are expelled into the air– e-cigarettes can contain higher amounts of addictive nicotine.

Vaping and smoking e-cigarettes are now commonplace at most colleges and universities in the United States. “I love vapes because they’ve helped so many of my friends quit smoking cigarettes,” Autumn Carney’19 said. “Freshmen year I think all of my friends smoked cigarettes, but slowly they’ve been taking on vaping instead. I personally like vaping, although I keep it at the lowest nicotine level so I won’t really go through…withdrawal. Also it’s kind of just a healthier oral fixation than other things like cigs or chewing tobacco or something. I’m not really a fan of juuls because the nicotine levels are too high for me.”

In January, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine found that the continued usage of flavored products will eventually lead to consuming traditional cigarettes. The long term effects of Juuls (which tend to have more potent nicotine levels) and other e-cigarette products on the respiratory system, including the effects of chemicals created by the addition of heat in the electronic devices, are unknown. “The developing adolescent brain is particularly vulnerable to addiction,” the FDA stated last Wednesday. Researchers have also pointed out that brain development can continue over the age of 25.

“The problematic aspect of [the high levels of nicotine in Juuls] is that people often become more addicted to nicotine because of the convenience,” Noel Murray ’21 said. “While it is possible to make a pod last a week or two (like a pack of cigarettes), often this is consumed much faster and it’s easy to become more hooked…I ended up smoking more in the end.” When it comes to students vaping on campus, Murray stated, “I have no problems with juuling inside, or on sidewalks, same with cigarettes. I have always been annoyed by those massive vapes that people carry around and use to blast industrial-amounts of sugary smoke into my face…but those are thankfully becoming less common.”

In July of 2016, the American Lung Association found that diacetyl, a flavoring product formerly used in popcorn and dairy products, is now used in e-cigarette vapor. The chemical has resulted in deaths and hundreds of cases of bronchiolitis obliterans, otherwise known as “popcorn lung,” which causes scarring, inflammation, thickening and narrowing of the tiny air sacs in the lungs. Symptoms are similar to that of chronic pulmonary disease, including coughing, wheezing, shortness of breath, exhaustion, and skin irritation. The resulting scarring to the lungs and constriction of the airways is irreversible. Treatment is centered around reducing symptoms and preventing further damage. Harvard researchers in 2015 found that 39 out of 51 e-cigarette flavors contain diacetyl, and that 92 percent contain either diacetyl or other known harmful chemicals. Juul Labs does not currently use diacetyl in its liquid.

The Chief Executive of Juul Labs, Ken Burns, stated that they “will work pro­actively with the FDA in response to its request. . . . We are committed to preventing underage use of our product, and we want to be part of the solution in keeping ­e-cigarettes out of the hands of young people.” Juul Labs has also taken steps to delete social media posts that target youths.

Gottlieb is also calling for a plan to lower nicotine levels in traditional cigarettes in order to make them non-addictive. The FDA does not currently enforce electronic cigarette companies to disclose all ingredients used in their products.

Sources: The Washington Post, The New York Times, American Lung Association, The New Yorker

]]>http://beloitcollegeroundtable.com/2018/10/03/fda-threatens-ban-on-juuls-and-e-cigarettes-amidst-addiction-health-risks/feed/02623Language framing: The left is losing the language gamehttp://beloitcollegeroundtable.com/2018/10/02/language-framing-the-left-is-losing-the-language-game/
http://beloitcollegeroundtable.com/2018/10/02/language-framing-the-left-is-losing-the-language-game/#respondTue, 02 Oct 2018 06:56:34 +0000http://beloitcollegeroundtable.com/?p=2597Don’t think of an elephant. The elephant isn’t there. The elephant isn’t real so don’t think about it. Don’t listen to the people who tell you about what the elephant is doing. The elephant isn’t doing that, or anything else for that matter, because there is no elephant. Don’t think of an elephant.

We’re obviously thinking about elephants now. That’s because the word elephant was just used seven times. Even when denying the existence of an elephant, the word, that is, the written descriptor of the idea of an elephant, is still being employed. The elephant wins.

The elephant continues to win. Whoever controls the words controls the ways in which ideas are framed. Anyone can disagree with your beliefs, but so long as they use the same framework of words you use to describe your beliefs, even in adamant opposition to them, you win.

America is not in the throes of a culture war. It is locked into a language game, and the Republican Party knows it better than anyone. Conservative strategists have purposefully worked to control the dialogue through terminology, and it has proven exceptionally effective. Increasingly, facts don’t matter. Their description does.

The Power of the Frame

Human beings do not behave rationally. Research conducted by Nobel Prize Winner Daniel Kahneman displays that people are consistently irrational, reliant on mental shortcuts to quicken reasoning. This means that everyone is susceptible to frames that simplify and distort ideas.

“Frames are mental structures that you use every day to understand just about anything,” Professor George Lakoff explains. Everything we do and perceive is understood through developed conceptual frameworks, which affect our conclusions, beliefs, and behaviors.

Lakoff is a Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California. His research on language framing centers on the understanding that the ways people say things are often more important than what is actually being said. The words used to explain an idea do more to influence people’s perceptions than the idea itself.

A recent study shows that framing has a massive effect on our political views. Participants in the study were presented with brief passages about crime in a hypothetical city named Addison. The wording of the passages differed between half of the participants. One half read a passage that described the crime problem as a “beast preying” on Addison, while the other half was given a passage that framed crime as a “virus infecting” the city.

These differing metaphors strongly affected the views of the participants. Those who were shown the “beast” frame were more likely to support harsher, punitive measures against crime, whereas those who read the “virus” frame tended to support reformative action.

Most notable is the participants’ lack of awareness of the framing’s effect on them. When asked to explain their reasoning, no one mentioned the metaphor, pointing instead to statistics that remained unchanged between the two passages.

Once you understand just how covertly powerful a frame is, it becomes clear that the effects of their purposeful usage cannot be underestimated or ignored. The Republican Party has already recognized the power of language framing, and has been using it to great effect.

The Conservative Frame Game

“One of the cleverest things that conservatives have done is to take the symbols of patriotism and claim them for their own,” Lakoff says in a video from 2008. “They’ve claimed the flag, they’ve claimed notions like freedom, democracy, all the good words.”

In 1970, soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell Jr. came out with a memo outlining a strategy for promoting conservative thought. It called for the creation of professorships in major universities to teach right-wing modes of thinking. Such positions were to be sponsored by wealthy conservatives, who would also be encouraged to set up research institutes to sponsor conservative scholarship. The memo suggested conservative media be consolidated to better broadcast right-wing ideas.

The memo led to a 30-year investment of $2-3 billion and the creation of 43 conservative think tanks. The result has been a unification of conservative ideology and a strengthened understanding of the ways in which language can be used to convince people of ideas.

Lakoff considers the term, “tax relief.” It feels innocuous at first, but when examined it’s a purposefully loaded frame. The word “relief” indicates a release from a form of suffering or discomfort. Anyone who relieves someone of suffering is most often imagined as behaving benevolently.

Taxes are then implicitly framed as negative, a source of discomfort without benefit, something one should want to be relieved from. The conservative promise of “tax relief” then becomes appealing. Taxes are a form of suffering, who wouldn’t want relief? Who wouldn’t promise that?

These loaded terms are everywhere. Ask yourself: why are social support programs referred to as “entitlements” and not “rights”? One implies an undeserved and inconvenient demand, the other a fundamental and reasonable necessity.

Why are laws designed to curb pollution and the degradation of natural resources known as environmental “restrictions”? Why not “protections”? The word “restrictions” tells us that environmental laws limit our growth in some way. The word “protections” tells us that we benefit from the environment’s continued health.

In all of these frames, the elephant wins. If you say you’re against tax relief, you’re implicitly accepting the idea that taxes are a form of suffering. If you support entitlement programs, you’re also admitting that they’re unnecessary demands. Even though the environment is vital to our health as a population, how can you possibly get people excited about restrictions?

Even when denying the elephant, you acknowledge and speak about the elephant.

Using the frames laid out by conservative media and scholarship gives them immediate control of the terms of the debate.

In March of 2016, Lakoff wrote an article called “Understanding Trump” that detailed the ways in which Trump “uses your brain against you” and sent it to every member of the Clinton campaign.

Lakoff was concerned that the media-frenzy surrounding Trump was causing us to think of elephants all the time. News outlets repeated trump’s false claims and tweets, and his frames were thus spread further, taking deeper root in mass consciousness.

In his article, Lakoff advised the Clinton campaign repeatedly reiterate its own position, and to stop repeating Trump’s statements.

The Clinton campaign instead attempted to use Trump’s words against him in a series of ads splicing his public scandals together. This was an error. It spread Trump’s frames for him, giving more people a chance to think of the elephant.

Progressives are losing the language game because they’re not playing it. The left has forfeited control of the dialogue’s framework by allowing conservatives to set the terms. That must change.

Understanding the American Family

One of the most effective ways of convincing someone to support an idea is by framing it in terms of their value system. Conservatives and progressives have differing moral frameworks to serve the same metaphor: the country as a larger American family.

Lakoff argues that if you understand the country as a family, and the conservative and progressive positions as articulations of differing models of family, the reasoning behind the left and right’s respective values becomes clearer.

The model of a progressive family is such that there are two parents who share responsibility for raising their children. They are expected to communicate clearly and directly with their children to foster a shared sense of understanding. Their children’s fulfillment is valued, and parents work to provide their kids with opportunities to help them decide what kind of life they want to live.

The model of a conservative family is significantly different. The conservative model values strict parenting, where the parent is the moral authority of the family. The parent is assumed to be right and is not to be questioned. The task of parents is not to encourage children to do what feels good, but what the parents say is right. When a child disobeys a parent, the parent is responsible for punishing the child painfully enough to discourage them from disobeying again. The child develops discipline to resist doing what feels good and instead doing what the parent says is right, a discipline that’s viewed as vital for living a prosperous and meaningful life.

When viewed through this metaphor, the policy positions and governing philosophies of the left and right begin to make a great deal of sense. For example, in matters of law enforcement the right favors the harsh punishment of criminals to teach discipline and discourage disobedience, whereas the left pushes for communicative measures to develop a shared understanding that prevents further breaches.

The metaphor extends to most all modes of conservative and liberal thought. The right tends to value loyalty to an in-group, respect for authority, and purity. The left prefers fairness, reciprocity, and a reduction of harm.

Understanding these conceptual frameworks helps you communicate more pragmatically and strategically to those you wish to convince. You could get a conservative to support environmental protections by framing the protection of natural resources and landscapes in terms of preserving the nation’s purity. Similarly, you could get a liberal to support increased military spending by emphasizing its employment benefits for poor and disadvantaged citizens.

Get in the Game

Lakoff argues that one of the left’s biggest problems is that it’s divided. Democrats have not taken a concerted effort to build and broadcast frames that clearly and intuitively communicate their values and convince others of their ideas.

Negating a frame does nothing but reinforce its existence. What liberals need to do is develop a practical language that appeals to a wide and varied audience, one that simply frames the basic values of empathy, sustainability, a reduction of collective harm.

These notions, when framed strategically, appeal to almost everyone. The specific beliefs existent along the political spectrum of the left don’t matter, so long as everyone can agree on and conceptualize the basic ideological tenets. Developing a shared language unifies a group, no matter how varied, towards the same aims. Possessing your own frames to articulate your ideas gives you leverage in the language game.

The Democratic Party must invest and strategize to develop such frames, to properly broadcast and communicate its message, on its own terms, and to combat and undermine conservative frames, not by negating them, but by undercutting their foothold in American consciousness.

You either play the language game or you lose the language game. Considering what’s at stake, the left can’t afford to sit it out.

]]>http://beloitcollegeroundtable.com/2018/10/02/language-framing-the-left-is-losing-the-language-game/feed/02597Wisconsin businessman finances three classes of college studentshttp://beloitcollegeroundtable.com/2018/10/02/wisconsin-businessman-finances-three-classes-of-college-students/
http://beloitcollegeroundtable.com/2018/10/02/wisconsin-businessman-finances-three-classes-of-college-students/#respondTue, 02 Oct 2018 06:49:01 +0000http://beloitcollegeroundtable.com/?p=2594On the first day of school at Luck High School in Luck, Wis., Principal Brad Werner announced at a schoolwide assembly that all of the 34 graduating students who want to attend technical college will receive full funding from local bank owner Dennis Frandsen. This is the second time Frandsen has paid for students in small towns to attend technical college. Frandsen’s fundingwill cover tuition and books.

Luck, a small town of a little over 1,000 people located in northeast Wisconsin, was where the 85-year-old Frandsen grew up on a dairy farm. His first business, a lumber yard, opened in Luck in 1951. Frandsen now employs over 1,000 people across multiple states in the Midwest, making him a self-made millionaire.

According to Luck High School principal Brad Werner, Frandsen wanted to provide scholarships for vocational schools because “there are already a lot of scholarship opportunities for students headed to four-year schools. There is also a shortage of skilled workers like electricians and plumbers.”

This is not the first time Frandsen has changed students’ lives. In 2017 Frandsen pledged to pay for any of the 59 graduating students in Rush City, Minn. to attend a two-year college. Rush City, a small town near the border of Wisconsin, is where Frandsen owns and operates more branches of his company, Frandsen Corporation. He is currently financing Rush City High School’s graduating class to attend Pine City Technical and Community College in Pine City, Minnesota, just north of Ruch City. He has made the same pledge again for this year’s senior class of 2019.

In an interview with Minnesota’s KARE 11,Frandsen explained he was inspired after watching high school graduations and realizing that many college scholarships only go to the top students. “What about the average student?” he asked.“Are we just going to forget about them?[…] I thought it was the right thing to do. I was able to do it, so why shouldn’t I?” Frandsen has also started the Frandsen Family Foundation to help pay college tuitions for students in small towns. Frandsen himself was educated in a one-room schoolhouse, and neither of his parents had been able to attend high school.

Back in Luck, Wis., morale is high. Werner feels that “the scholarship offer has also motivated underclassmen to buckle down in case they get a similar opportunity.” There will be a parent meeting at the high school next month to provide more information to the public.